Many business leaders prefer to have a business case for every decision they make. Sometimes that’s not so obvious: your new, high-quality coffee machine, for example. Better-tasting coffee can improve employee morale, encourage people to take productivity-boosting breaks, and prompt closer working relationships. But what’s the actual ROI? It’s hard, even impossible, to accurately measure.
There are other investments, like the assuring quality of your core software systems, where ROI is tricky, but possible, to quantify with the right tools. As a leader, you simply want high quality and adaptable software. So here’s some good news. Early in 2025, BonCode will release a new digital tool – an ROI calculator – to help you make your own calculations.
Until then, here are four ways to articulate the business case and value of obtaining independent, fact-based insights into your custom-coded software.
1. It’s easier and faster to work with clean code
It stands to reason that if your source code is easy to read and analyze, it’s also easier and faster for your developers to work with. Code that’s cleaner and easy to analyze frees up time for more meaningful activities like adding new functionality and features.
On average, developers spend 52 minutes per day on actual coding activity, that’s according to a recent study by Software. What if you could double that time to 104 minutes of coding per day? Projects would be completed in half the time. Or your team could produce twice as much functionality in the same time. Even a 20% to 30% increase in coding time would yield a huge increase in productivity.
So if you know the cost of your devs and their productivity, it’s easier to benchmark vendors, internal teams, and technologies and calculate your ROI.
2. Fewer bugs, more development time
It’s estimated between 1 and 25 errors occur per every 1,000 lines of code. The more code your developers produce, the more bugs and errors are likely to emerge. Fixing code is part of the reason why developers spend less than one hour per day on coding, on average.
Better quality source code is much easier to understand, and therefore makes it much faster for developers to put things right. As the number of bugs decreases, the amount of time available for fresh and more exciting coding projects increases. Again, that’s pure cost put to better use, and easy to calculate with the right data insights.
3. Fewer bugs creates business impact
Let’s stay with the theme of bugs and their impact, though this time not on the impact they have on software engineers and development, but the impact they have on your business.
Even with robust testing in place, bugs and errors will inevitably enter production. The question is how severely they will impact the software system. Some bugs might be annoying, but there is no real cost attached to them. Others can bring your business processes to a grinding halt. And there’s an obvious cost to that.
So let’s assume three categories of bugs:
- Low impact– such as the wrong placement of a button or wrong font for a button.
- Medium impact – a larger issue that needs to be fixed before it snowballs.
- High impact– a major flaw that could impact business continuity.
If you assign costs to these categories, you can easily calculate the ROI if these bugs were fewer. For example, what is the business cost of a Category 3 bug setting your business process to a halt? Costs can be huge. Your reputation may be at risk. Lowering this risk by 5 % only will probably support your entire business case for better software quality.
Adopting this approach helps software managers to prioritize the work to be done, analyze financial impact of better software quality.
4. Improved retention of software engineers
Remember that coffee machine we mentioned earlier? In isolation, your ROI on that machine is hard to quantify. But put it into the context of your business as an employer – a place where people want to work – and its value becomes clearer.
There’s an extremely competitive market for the best software developers. Losing a key member of your dev team can also cost your business time and money. Sourcing, recruiting, and training top talent is expensive and time-consuming. Recruiting the right people can easily take three months or more. It might then take a few more months for them to be as productive as the person they replaced. That’s half a year or more lost due to one person leaving.
But securing a replacement is the easy part. The hardest part is retaining them. Decent coffee and a great working environment might help. But for software developers, a clean and easy-to-understand codebase makes coming to work each day much more appealing, than spending most of their day picking their way through someone else’s spaghetti code.
If you retain a software engineer because you have a nicer working environment (be it due to coffee, cleaner code, or both) how much money would you save?
Coming soon – a free tool for calculating ROI on Software Quality Assurance
Here at BonCode, we’re putting the final touches on a new web-based tool for calculating the ROI on static source code analysis. This free, interactive tool will enable managers to calculate the financial value of their software teams and unearth the potential ROI of a cleaner and more maintainable codebase.
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